We've Moved To A New Home

Thank you so much for reading the Executive Update over the last few years. We've just moved over to a new blogging service, and all of our posts will be moving over to there.
The new address is http://blog.netshare.com. Hope to see you there!

Hunters or Gatherers – The Darwinism of Job Placement

While at the Kennedy Information recruiting conference in Florida last month, I heard Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com, talk about how his company had changed its strategy when they discovered the focus is not on the job but on the resume as far as the recruiter is concerned. Recruiters would rather search for qualified candidates than harvest a flock of incoming resumes; they would rather be hunters than gatherers. So Monster started gathering resumes that recruiters could search. According to one attendee from Rand McNally, they receive 250,000 applicants for every 300 jobs posted, which means it’s easier to search for qualified candidates than wade through hundreds of thousands of applications.

I’ve also heard from a few sources that people who have their resumes posted online are more likely to land a job than applicants responding to posted job openings. Which brings us back to one of my favorite themes – why you need to become the hunted rather than the hunter when looking for new job.

With services like BlueSteps, ExecuNet, NETSHARE, and so many others, it’s easier than ever for recruiters to hone in on the candidates with the specific credentials they are seeking. And more recruiters are turning to networking resources like LinkedIn so they can tap professionals with the right professional experience, whether they are actively looking for a job or not.

In many ways, the Internet has made the recruiter’s job easier. Now they can use their search savvy to find exactly the candidate they are looking for, without having to rely on third-party references or referrals. After all, I would rather trust my own judgment about someone’s qualifications rather than rely on someone else.

Which means that the job seeker’s job is now harder than ever. If the recruiters are becoming hunters rather than resume gatherers, then it’s even more imperative that you become one of the hunted. That means aggressive networking, posting your resume in the right places, and making sure that you are putting your best foot forward to become prominent and easily searchable. So get your credentials out there in the right places with the right key words and let the recruiters find you.

Using Job Boards for the Long Game

In my travels recently, I attended another Kennedy Information event where a number of executives from different online job boards gathered together to discuss the state of online recruiting. After comparing notes, we all came to the same realization: that online job boards are no longer about just jobs, but they are playing a larger role in career development. The focus needs to move beyond immediate job search to career management, which is something that many job seekers and job posters have yet to recognize.

Job seekers who are only looking for their next gig are in denial about how the world of work and career development has changed. Career management has become more complex, and using job boards correctly can be a big help in keeping you current in your market of choice. A good online career service not only feeds you qualified leads from recruiters and companies who are actively looking for candidates, it lets you talk to your peers about the state of the market, tells you who is hiring, and what kinds of credentials and criteria potential employers are looking for. A good job board can be an important tool for career management.

You might want to think of online job services in terms of an online dating service; are you looking for a committed relationship, or a casual date? The competition in online dating services is at least as fierce as competition between online job services, and as a result, online daters are starting to look at these sites for different applications. Match.com, for example, has a reputation for being more hip and attracts a younger crowd more interested in “hook ups,” where Eharmony is billing itself for people seeking a lasting relationship. The same metaphor works for job boards – are you just looking to “hook up” with an employer for a job or are you looking for something more lasting from an online career service?

If you are looking at your career as the long game, then you need assistance that can grow with your needs. Find a career service that can help you build for the future, as well as meet your short-term objectives. Consider if that job service can help you connect with other professionals, share intelligence about salaries, give you resources about hiring companies, and help you develop your own career portfolio. Look for those lasting online resources that can help you manage your career.

Using Your Raise to Raise Your Marketability

I was talking to Don Orlando, founder and president of the McLean Group and the scheduled speaker for this month’s Experts Connection teleseminar. Don will be speaking on strategies to win that next raise, but more importantly, he will be exploring how to use that raise as a means to advance your career.

Just as a good job board should be part of a larger career management strategy, getting that next raise also should be part of a bigger career program. As Don pointed out to me, it’s not just about the money, but those who get paid more get the more challenging assignments and get to do more interesting things because they are more valuable to the company.

The secret to getting that raise, and advancing your career, is to make the case for being more valuable. You have to demonstrate your worth; prove your deliver value to your employer. If you can’t make the case for ROI, then your employer will give those plum assignments to someone else. So with your current employer (and your career) you have to take a longer view and make the case for your professional value, with an eye toward that next juicy assignment. You need to think of each raise and each assignment as another building block; another stepping stone in your career.

Don has a number of strategies to help you make the case for your value to the company, but the most insightful is documenting your contributions to the company at least once a week. What problems did you solve? What contributions have you made that will show up on the corporate bottom line?

In maintaining this list, it’s crucial that you are honest with yourself and only track those accomplishments that are real and, ideally, measurable. Don’t bother with “to do” lists, tasks that are uncompleted, or events beyond your control, or tasks with no outcome. You don’t want to waste time documenting the symptoms, only the solutions. (As Don says, documenting the symptoms is like taxation without representation.) Start with the challenge presented, then capture the actions that led to a successful result.

This kind of documentation exercise will not only give you the ammunition you need for that next raise, it also will give you a ready-made list of achievements for your resume. It also will give you real insight into where you excel, where you make a real contribution, and help point you toward your next promotion or position. It’s all part of career management.

Obvious But Not Easy

I recently attended the Kennedy Information Executive Search Summit in New York, and one of the speakers who interested me was David Maister of Maister Associates, and author of a number of books including First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals and Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement. He was talking about his latest book, which focuses on doing things that are obvious, but not easy.

As Maister points out, there are no new business ideas. (He says, with an impish grin, the only reason he keeps writing business books is to rehash the old ideas in order to collect royalties.) What people need to do to succeed, whether it is in their career, their job search, or life in general, is incredibly obvious. The metaphor he uses is that of the fat smoker; he knows what he needs to do – quit smoking and lose weight – but that’s not easy.

(For those of you who want to look deeper into human nature and resistance to change, I also recommend reading Change or Die by Alan Deutschman – interesting stuff.)

To make his point, Maister polled the audience, which was largely made up of recruiters, about their mission statement. When asked if exceptional client service was part of their mission, everyone raised their hands. When asked if they had a means to measure the level of service, only one or two raised their hands. His point: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you fire someone for failure to perform, but you haven’t given them a metric for performance, then you end up sending the wrong message to employees, and you are doing nothing to differentiate yourself. If, for example, your mission is to provide outstanding customer service, but you only reward fiscal performance without rewarding customer satisfaction, then your mission and your actions are out of sync. Sure, money drives the corporate machine, but is contributing to the bottom line the only metric you want to use to gauge employee performance? Is money the only factor that will promote growth and assure ongoing success? The answer seems obvious, but implementing strategy to make the change isn’t easy.

The same is true in the world of career search. Recruiters need to think harder about what their clients’ need, and they need to come up with better metrics to gauge success. Depending on whether you are an in-house recruiter or part of a retained search firm, you are considered a cost center or a revenue generator by executive management, and that colors how you want to measure success (and how you are treated). Still, I want to challenge recruiters to think about the metrics they apply to measure success. Of course, they want to find the right candidate to fill an executive position. That’s the obvious part. How they go about achieving that end is less obvious, and changing the way recruiters think about candidates won’t be easy. Are they really looking in the right places for qualified candidates? Are they using the right screening criteria? Are they working for long-term success rather than short-term results?

Take a close look at how you measure your own success and what you need to become successful and you will find the answers probably are obvious, but not easy.

Importing the Ghost in the Machine

One of our recent posts talked about the importance of making a real impact in a virtual world as an extension of personal branding. This is even more important when you decide to work abroad. Our September session of the Experts Connections series focused on international assignments, and how a job overseas can help you advance your career. Of course, that only works of they don’t forget you at home.

Roddy Gow of Gow & Partners, a UK-based executive recruiting firm, noted that when you accept an assignment in a foreign office, you become invisible at home. The challenge when you take a foreign assignment is no one sees you around the office anymore, but they don’t know where you went. The water cooler gossip could be you left the company, were reassigned, demoted to the stockroom, who knows? And a typical response when you get back to the company is, “Oh, I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you?”

No one is going to blow your horn for you so be sure to tell your network where you are and what you are doing. Tell your contact where you are and what you are up to. Add a tag line in the language of your guest country to your online signature. Let them know about the local color and tell your friends, “wish you were here.” It will make a bigger impression when you get back.

Your Job is Not Your Career

I recently was reviewing a new book Career Distinction: Stand Out By Building Your Brand, by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson. One of the interesting insights to emerge from it is notion that we no longer have careers in the traditional sense. These days, a job is not a career as it was in the fifties and sixties. In the old sitcoms like Bewitched, where Darren went to the same job every day with no thought of career change and no worry about getting fired. And in the comic strips, Blondie’s Dagwood has been wrangling with Mister Dithers for 75 years without worrying about losing his job.

Today, there is less corporate loyalty (both by the employer and employee) and work tends to be results-driven and project-based. There is less of a sense of working toward long-term success, and more short-term, higher yield objectives. Corporations are more concerned with quarterly results and immediate stock performance these days, and as a result employment is driven by short-term objectives. (In contrast to Blondie’s Dagwood, consider the plight of Ted Forth in the Sally Forth comic strip who lost his job of many years; a more realistic storyline for the times.)

One of my NETSHARE contacts shared his experience with a large Fortune 500 company. Whenever they finished a project, they were invited to find a similar project within the organization, and if they couldn’t find a project, they would lose their job. This kind of corporate attitude is becoming increasingly prevalent as corporations struggle to boost their bottom line and increase shareholder value in an increasingly competitive market.

In a recent Ask the Coach session with Kim Batson and Deb Dib, for example, one of the callers said that he was taking a more aggressive approach to building his personal brand through networking and blogging after being laid off for the second time in four years – clearly he understands that no job is permanent and keeping your network intact is becoming increasingly important.

So what does that mean for executives. Be nimble! Be connected! Be ready! Be visible! Increase your online profile through social networking and blogging, and be prepared because the ax may fall when you least expect it.